Defining Moments
by ScumFreezebag
Summary: A few moments in time from Team Gai.


**Basically, I have a lot of Team Gai-based fanfiction ideas and not enough energy to write them. So, I just wrote them out as a series of moments in time. **

* * *

The first time Gai saw his new team, he thought he would burst into tears of joy and pride.

The first time Gai's team saw him, they thought that he was a very strange man in a jumpsuit.

Tenten realised early on that there would be a lot of awkward silences in the group, and that she would have to end them. She discovered that Neji was always willing to berate everyone else's faults and that Lee was always eager to describe his training regimen.

Lee considers his team his family. Whenever he shares these sentiments with them, Gai cries, Tenten laughs and Neji raises an eyebrow.

Neji stared out a window after the chuunin exams thinking about birds being freed of their cages. Two loud voices and bodies burst into his room, commiserating their failures and bouncing on his bed.

Neji thought, then, about metaphors.

Tenten and Lee often wondered if Neji cared, right up to the day when they got proof. After beating up some C-level bandits, they surveyed the battlefield, not realising one man was still conscious and very, very angry. He made a wide swing with his knife at Tenten. Lee heroically pushed her out of the way, and both got pretty badly cut.

Neji, after giving them countless lectures on how bare-fisted fighting was inferior and weak, punched the unfortunate bandit until he asked for his mother.

The first time Tenten suspected Gai was trying to set her up with one of her teammates was when he told them to come to training scantily clad, then declared they were wrestling for a greased watermelon.

A few minutes later, the three were locked in an intimate embrace of skin, grease, and watermelon. Not for the first or last time, both boys felt that some strange, otherworldly force was trying to set them up with Tenten.

The first time Lee defeated Neji, he refused to believe it. He just stood over him, bleeding a little, and wondered why Neji wasn't standing up to hit him back.

Tenten still claims that this was not the first time Lee suceeded. She considers the team eating contest where Lee ate twenty-two bowls of ramen his first victory over Neji.

Neither boy is sure of the day when they realised that Tenten was falling impossibly far behind them. They are sure that day was the one they determined to help her catch up.

Neji has observed true base treachery many times in his life. He feels it every time Tenten leaves their unofficial alliance of sanity and encourages Lee or Gai in one of their ideas.

Every time there is a warning about perverts in the village, Tenten giggles as she feels the boys trying to secretly follow her, with their weapons out and their eyes peeled.

Every member of Team Gai hopes to die before their teammates. They are all terrified of being left behind.

Tenten blames her teammates for the fact that "the surgery was successful" is now her favourite phrase.

Lee often trains so hard he actually throws up afterward. His team have made a secret schedule of who would leave out some food for him afterwards, leading Lee to believe that there are kindly ghosts haunting the training ground.

Neji secretly wondered if his team would want him if he was weak.

He stopped wondering that the day he became a Jounin. He walked in on his team, sitting in a circle and trying not to cry. It was gratifying to see them leap up, consoled, when he said that he was staying with them rather than joining the Anbu.

Neji once told Tenten that one of his greatest fears was that her or Lee would be in a hostage situation one day, as every choice he could make would be the wrong one.

Gai beat the crap out of Kakashi when he warned him that Neji could easily pull a Sasuke, seeing as how the boys were pretty similar.

Sometimes, Tenten sits on Lee's back while he does pushups and throws at targets she's set up. It's not a real challenge to her marksmanship, she just find it to be a comforting experience.

The first time Tenten had to spend a night in the hospital, the whole team stayed too. Eventually, Gai and Lee fell asleep on each other's shoulders, two snoring lumps of green spandex. Neji stayed awake till dawn, a silent sentinel.

Neji finally realises why he doesn't like Shikamaru as he watches Tenten analyse battle situations with him while playing with his spiky ponytail.

Lee once rolled down a tree after he rescued a baby bird. When he finally stopped, dizzy and covered in sap, the team heard Neji laugh for the first time.

Tenten always gives carefully made and selected weapons as presents. Lee often writes poetry, makes crafts, or even choreographs a dance with Gai. Neji rarely gives gifts, but when he does, he is so red in the face that the moment of giving is as valuable as the present itself.

Team Gai always attends funerals together. The first time they went to one minus one member, they all wondered why the sun had dared to rise that morning.

At the end of a long battle, when the team is reunited, they share a quiet look that is relief and triumph and love, all rolled into one_. _Then Lee's eyes get their fire back, and Neji finds his ice. Gai strikes a pose as Tenten twirls a knife over her knuckles and wonders what will happen tomorrow.

* * *

**So... um... yeah. **


End file.
